General Discussion

JFK -- hardly a bloodthirsty warmonger, or fan of violence otherwise -- uttered those words at a time when smaller countries around the world were falling to Communist insurrections, or in danger of doing so. I'm sure he didn't mean it as a threat, but a warning -- advice which was sincerely intended to be heeded. Those in power must meet the demands of their people, or their people will depose them; the more violently they try to hold on to power, the more violence will be brought against them. That doesn't guarantee by any means that their successors will be white knights or angels of mercy, only that they will get their chance to hold the levers of power. If they fall back on the methods of the departed oppressor, they, the new oppressors, are likely to meet the same fate.

Currently, we're not talking about just countries and popular revolutions -- but those who benefit/profit from the current system, directly or indirectly, without ever having been elected, must be able to examine the consequences of their actions for the public and consider what resentments they may have engendered in the process of pursuing their personal rise to the top, or their corporation's business model to which they attribute their success. The recent killing of a greedy CEO whose business model was to deny (often life-saving) medical care to millions -- a perversion of traditional models where profits depend on providing something of value, not denying it -- should lead to some genuine soul-searching on the part of business "leaders" and organizations to whatever extent they are capable of it. Unfortunately, for many that may be no great extent at all, or even zero. Corporations, of course, despite putative claims that they "are people too", lack souls utterly. Morally, they are much less than the sum of their parts. So I wouldn't expect much change there, even if there are more examples of such killings, which will only confirm their ultimate futility (at least in a practical sense).

Only regulation can force proper behavior on corps whose self-declared sole purpose is profit at anyone else's cost. And until we can find politicians who won't sell out for a cut of those profits, we won't see change.

Health insurance, of course, is a uniquely dreadful example, because it differs from other forms of insurance in that it does not insure concrete, replaceable objects for the cost of replacement, but claims to insure an intangible, almost indefinable abstract condition of "good health", whose meaning is time- and context-dependent, and for which there is no off-the-shelf plug-in replacement. Such ambiguity allows those drawing up the contracts to determine whether they have or have not delivered what customers paid for -- an inherently bad design in very principle, which no amount of patching will ever render fully functional.